This happened to me for a different reason, but it was the same level of frustrating.<p>After months of playing MW and Black Ops, one day I queue up with friends and after waiting 5+ minutes no server would be found. We try over and over finally we realize its me.<p>Googling around shows that I am "Shadow Banned" and everyone is like "go away cheater" online.<p>I've been playing online games with an in game name that contains the word "Erotica" for a while now (4+ years) and have had zero issues.<p>Turns out the word "Erotica" is BANNED by Activision, and they synced their identity management with Blizzard it got flagged.<p>I found ONE random thread on Reddit where a guy ran into the same problem and gave a link to directly log into their system.<p>Once logged in I got "Your username contains adult content and must be changed".<p>After changing it, and waiting 3 days, it 'synced' and my account was unbanned.<p>The whole thing was absolutely stupid, I had paid $60 and could not play any of their games.<p>It pretty much ruined the game for me, I haven't given them a dollar since.
Unfortunately we gave up our right to own software when we let companies own the servers. Back in the day you could get banned from a server and go find somewhere else to play. Now you'll get banned for life, and in some cases, even banned from the single player mode. Sorry, no refunds!<p>There's a reason pirate crews are hailed as heroes...and it's not the free software. Games legitimately work better when they are cracked almost 100% of the time.
These bans also block the single player mode?! That is absolutely absurd. False bans for multiplayer aren't anything new (unfortunately), but also blocking the singleplayer mode, making the purchased product 100% unusable seems criminal.
I started the wiki linked in the article (codconsumer.org). Long time HN lurker and was pleasantly surprised to see this here!<p>I was only banned for a week, but I'm absolutely certain that there was nothing sketchy happening on my side. It's pretty annoying when they're charging money for time-limited events like Battle Passes, then you lose some of that time. Of course, it's a much bigger problem for the many who have been permabanned and don't know why. And it's still happening to others.<p>I would really like for this to end quietly with some better policies on account reviews, and more transparency on the findings of those reviews. I don't think that's too much to ask after being locked out of a $70 purchase. So far they have been completely silent on the matter. So the wiki stays up and we hope to someday get a word out of them.
This is a consumer rights issue across our industry. Algorithmic customer support “decisions” should always be appealable to a human audience.<p>My Google account was banned years ago, “computer says no” - all of my attempts to appeal failed. I at no point broke their terms. Nobody cares, I lost all of my data.<p>I hope that a class action prevails against Activision. And I hope that across our industry consumers receive more robust rights. Not being able to reach a human at your company quickly escalates from a being cost optimization, to outright fraud.
In this case, it really looks like Activision's Anti-Cheat is broken and banning people unfairly (if we can trust OP, which I have no reason not to).<p>A related problem though is that game developers have a really hard time trusting anyone who says they've been banned unfairly. Almost everyone who gets banned for valid reasons will claim they did nothing wrong, etc. This is especially true for delayed bans, as the person doesn't even realize that their account got flagged to be banned weeks before the actual ban took place.<p>Given that problem, when a developer gets reports of users being banned unfairly, it's <i>very</i> easy to ignore them as salty cheaters. Ideally there is a way for them to know exactly what tripped the anti-cheat, but sometimes it's hard as the client has to covertly tell the server to ban itself.
This has been going on since the release of MW2019. I myself was banned after trying to launch and play the single player campaign on Linux through Wine/Proton. I was unable to even launch the game to play the campaign again on Windows after that, and I no longer use Windows at all.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/nfeupc/modern_warfare_2019_account_permanently_banned" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/nfeupc/modern...</a><p>I emailed Activision support back and forth more than a dozen times explaining the issue, finally resulting in them saying they were escalating to another team. I sent them another four emails over three months, asking if there was any update, before asking if there was even anybody left alive at the company that my emails were reaching, with no response.<p>I really enjoyed the MW2019 campaign, but I won't be buying another game from Activision.
This author sounds like me minus a ban.<p>I really enjoy Call of Duty. Got extremely good at it in high school, along with my group of friends. Since then, I've had to move away and CoD has kept us connected multiple times per week. It's been a very enjoyable game for well over a decade.<p>In the past few years, it's become extremely clear to me that something is seriously wrong with CoD - and perhaps Activision as a whole. I'm willing to explain much of it away as "it's hard to run a big game at scale", but some the bugs are just inexcusable. Activision offers little to no insight or recourse when things break.<p>I have 700 hours in MW2/WZ1. I can't even stand to play the new game. It's just too broken.
> And moderators of popular forums like r/ModernWarfareII refuse to allow posts that try to increase awareness of the issue, again, likely assuming we’re all a bunch of whining cheaters. I don’t think they’re aware of the disservice they’re doing to their community by actively suppressing these reports (or conspiratorially, they’re influenced by Activision itself).<p>I don't think this is very conspiratorially. It's very clear that the mods are coordinating with Activision on releases and information. I've had several posts taken down over the years because they don't tow-the-line.
This is a feature! You and the other cheaters, whether you're actually baby or bathwater, will simply have to buy it again!!<p>IMO the only winning move is not to play. I loved calladoody back in university, but you've got to move with the times, yeah? OTOH, I'm not the one who really changed; I'm still all about dedicated servers, but they haven't been seen since Modern Warfare 1.<p>The winning move for the anticheat dev is shortly going to be not to play, either. It's one thing to implement increasingly invasive rootkits to find out who's watching your game's memory, but I've heard tell of devices that sit between the PC and monitor, using specialized ML to click M1 and fire when an enemy is detected in one's crosshairs. How can you check for something like that?
I'm thinking to create a new account per game.<p>This allows me to<p>* issue a chargeback without worries<p>* sell the account when I'm done with the game<p>Just the same with Google devices. NEVER buy a Google Pixel on your own account, as issuing a chargeback will cause them to block your whole account.
I purchased the game and was met with casmera-rhino before even playing a match or seeing a screen to chose what to play I payed $70+ for the game Ive been playing cod for years and years and my stats arent crazy im a casual player and not even a second look at my account after I appealed my ban on activisions website my fate was sealed permanently banned account with over $300+ worth of microtransactions and games and im unable to appeal and Im not sure what to do Im researching class action lawyers and getting advice and how to get my account or my money back from the company if anyone has any advice or is currently talking to a lawyer or some type of representative id really appreciate some info, thank you.
Trying to spread the word on Activision's faulty anti-cheat software and how they're permanently banning players with no explanation or recourse.
For roughly 25 years now - as long as modern DRM methods exist - there's constantly been reports of false positives, bugs, crashes, performance issues and security holes caused by DRM.<p>How anyone can believe that their DRM is infallible and not be prepared to deal with the issues it will inevitably cause, is beyond me.<p>Anyone with two brain cells to rub together should be aware, that they need to have a way to accept reports of false positives and investigate those. Even if "screw the customers" is company policy - you still need those reports to analyze and fix the flaws in your software.<p>Not doing that is basically like making it impossible to report bugs and suppress any talk about bugs anywhere - and then claiming your software is bug free, because there haven't been any bug reports. Highly dysfunctional.
On the topic of unfair bans, Roblox bans kid accounts for having malicious scripts hidden in models in Roblox Studio. They can detect it in the kid’s game, but allow it in their toolbox. Accounts with premium membership are not refunded for the remaining time left.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ROBLOXBans/comments/vqw1sj/my_6_year_old_roblox_account_got_banned_18_days/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/ROBLOXBans/comments/vqw1sj/my_6_yea...</a><p>I created a Tell HN thread at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33861309" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33861309</a>
This kind of absurdity could happen to anybody. I was a Destiny player since Destiny 1, had absolutely no problem campaign or multiplayer. Around the time of Destiny 2 Forsaken DLC, I got bored of it and stopped playing for about a year. One day, I decided to pick it up and replay the Forsaken single player campaign "Last Call". 10 minutes in, while I was enjoying it, suddenly the game froze, and I was kicked back to the menu screen. When tried to login, it told me my account is perma banned. Shocked, my first instinct was that this is some kind of mistake on Bungie side. However, after going through the fruitless appealing process, which Bungie denied without disclosing any specificity, I believe I'm one of those falsely banned.<p>This is the only time I got perma banned in any game in my life. The only possible reason I can think of is that I always use some AutoHotkey scripts I wrote myself as shortcuts for Windows control, and has nothing to do with Destiny. I don't really care much about not able to play Destiny again, but because Destiny 2 had moved to Steam, even today there is still a VAC ban record in my Steam profile, which I do care about.
This seems like it could result in actual lawsuits. While the license for the game exists, a court wouldn't look too kindly on this situation. Courts have the power to void contracts if they're against "public policy", so that should be something everyone should keep in mind.
Ban frequently comes with ban reason "Caserma rhino" which looks like that they must know what happened given this weird specific string as you can see on picture below.<p><a href="https://imageup.me/i96" rel="nofollow">https://imageup.me/i96</a><p>I as a player can say that game frequently crashes, shares a lot of bugs with previous version of call of duty and overall is just a copy od mw1 with worse UI and technical state.
250+ comments already so I fear my rant will disappear to the void, but I experienced this exact same thing with Apex Legends. I was fortunate to get my account back eventually, but the experience is the same.<p>I don't really care <i>that</i> much about my crappy in-game cosmetics, but to have access to the game ripped away from you with no actual explanation to what you did is a pretty big gut punch. The result I took from the experience is that EA/Respawn are untrustworthy and will never receive another penny of my money. Their steadfast "you cheated, no appeals, now shut up" attitude seems like poor long term planning if regular players are going to be randomly harmed by whatever happened.<p>I've pondered over the issue too, and ultimately I think the entire circus could be avoided if they were willing to discuss the specifics of banning. The notion that they don't need to tell you how you were detected as though it is some sort of protection for their anti-cheat methods is a disservice in customer relations. For me, I tried appealing a case against something I had no evidence for, so to ask a question about how I can make things right in an appeal (what logs do you need? what proof can I provide that this was a bug) ended up just flagging my account so I could no longer open tickets. I had found other users on Reddit who received the same ban (and consequentially, received unban at teh same time too, so it <i>was</i> a system bug). We were all treated the same. How to fix this? Have confidence in your anti-cheat to the point where you can say "we caught you doing X" so I can provide evidence to the contrary.<p>I suspect it is because they'd need to hire more staff to work customer service. They'd also need to give those staff the necessary tools to respond to customers which I can tell they do not have at the basic CSR level.<p>In the end, they lose a customer permanently. They also gain a vocal proponent against their services as I write similar rants every time I see a topic of it discussed. They don't really care much about me though. That's important to remember. They are willing to bulldoze the individual in hopes the larger reputation they maintain about being hard on cheaters doesn't backfire.
Good luck bro... I cheated at games especially MMO's from 2000 to 2005. Since then, with all new emails and account ID's I've seen more false positive bans than I saw positive bans in that previous period. I once left wire shark open and got battle eye and VAC banned. I was not attaching either to active network traffic or processes at the time. Just last week I got banned for having Charles proxy running by accident on my 5th DayZ account. I guess I should segregate my dev and play boxes... the problem is I make games.
It seems like a "you cheated and can no longer play the game" should be mandatorily accompanied by a full refund of the game and any in game purchases - in cash, not coupons, in game currency (because duh), etc.<p>It would sure as heck deal with the "you can't play the game you paid for" nonsense, and if they start putting all "cheaters" in a single set of servers any over-aggressive "you're a cheater" rules will cause people to stop playing the online modes that encourage in game transactions.
Best anti-cheat is to separate your cheaters from your general gamers, if some behavior is detected that indicates they are a cheater temporarily remove them from the same queue as normal players and treat all players they party or queue with the same. In this queue they only get paired against other questionable players. When they themselves or other in this cheater queue report a person enough times temporary ban the user from playing for one week, two weeks, four weeks. Depending on the strikes, but never perma ban.
Activation is a feted hulk and I hope they collapse under the weight of their misdeeds.<p>Certainly everyone who owns the game has bought the right to play offline. That said, the question of what "owners" are allowed to do in a multi-user product seems genuinely hard. Cheaters (and people who seek 'parasitic' experiences of all kinds) disrupt how the game is intended to be played. Consumer protections were developed for products that don't have that kind of entangled quality.
if it's a recent purchase and you've done nothing wrong: hit them where it hurts and issue a chargeback<p>at least that way they're not profiting from their scummy behaviour
I’m so thankful that articles such as this get written. At a minimum it his helps other customers avoid predatory businesses. At best, it helps apply pressure to companies to adopt better practices.
Isn’t this industry norm? I remember getting banned from Overwatch during Season 1 with no explanation given and when I sent support ticket I just got back “we can’t tell you the reason”
Probably going to be an unpopular opinion in this thread, but I am involved in a couple of medium sized (100-200 active members) gaming communities which have to deal with cheaters sometimes, one of which is fairly expert—many members are Global Elite (top Competitive rank) in CSGO, with many of the top players being ex minor league esports people(they all LAN fairly regularly so I can say confidently they aren’t cheaters), and I have never <i>heard</i> (as in someone knows someone) of <i>anyone</i> in over a decade in both communities getting unfairly banned from a AAA title or any title for that matter. And <i>if</i> they did it would <i>definitely</i> be the talk of the Discord/forums, getting called a cheater is pretty much the norm for these folks, so getting a ban would be something between hilarious and a slap in the face. So this is likely exceedingly rare, and many of these people <i>are</i> cheating, and consider their cheats benign and are just in denial that their macros are actually getting detected and earning them bans. Perhaps not OP, and perhaps not the sibling comments, but in my experience cheaters are typically pathological about not cheating.<p>Cheating of that type is so easy and common in many multiplayer games, and it really sucks the fun out of multiplayer when someone isn’t following the rules.
If this is true you should all gather and file a class action lawsuit immediately against Activision.<p>This is extremely user-hostile... even more than Apple-level-user-hostility.
I'll throw my two cents in.<p>I'm "UNDER REVIEW" right now. That means I'm shadow banned. I'm only able to match with other people that are shadow banned.<p>This is actually the second time I'm "UNDER REVIEW". I guess you can be under review multiple times? I had a 3 day period where I wasn't under review and everything went back to normal. As of today actually, I am now banned again.<p>It's pretty miserable. It's actually funny, most of the regular multiplayer lobbies are decentish. Nobody seems to be obviously cheating or hacking. Maybe once or twice I felt like someone might be cheating. It takes a very long time to find a match. And when you do find a match, you'd be lucky to have a sub 60ms ping.<p>DMZ just released. I really want to play it but I unfortunately cannot, I never find a match.<p>Also I just gotta throw this out there since I'm trashing on the game right now. This game crashes A LOT.
TLDR:<p>Activision has been criticized for its faulty anti-cheat software, which has resulted in permanent and unappealable account bans for players of its game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. Affected players are unable to access the single-player game, even though they paid $70 or more for it. The bans come with no explanation or ability to communicate with Activision. The issue has been met with "shut up and go away, cheater" responses on social media, and attempts to raise awareness are being suppressed on forums. Players are organizing to file reports with the Better Business Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission.
> Anyone who’s played (at least the PC version of) Modern Warfare II is fully aware of the instability and bugginess of the release<p>I’ve casually played this game quite a few times since release and not had any issue. Perhaps I’m too casual but I login, hope into a random quick match, shoot, die, repeat and turn off the console when I’m satisfied.
Have not hit this issue...yet. However, on my Xbox someone else's ActivisionID has inadvertently been tied to mine. Got in touch with the owner and when they go to unlink their account from my Xbox Live Activision's website just reloads. No errors, no codes or any confirmation or denial. Phone support is nonexistent, followed all other possible channels and cannot find or do anything.<p>I spent $70 for a game I can't play on my own account. I can't play with my friends, I can't level my own stuff, and there is nothing I can do. It's completely broken and I can't get a refund in any way. Anyone had success in disputing these purchases with their credit card companies?
Activision did a similar thing with the completely botched release of Warcraft 3 both the modern Battle.net re-release and the Reforged remake. The TLDR is that if you tried to play most any custom map - even privately - you would reconnect shortly later and find your account permanently banned. In some cases even if you ever actually got to start the custom map, just simply from trying to host a lobby. In my case it was a private lobby with two other friends for the old-school map "Enfos".<p>I filed an appeal/ticket with Blizzard and they gave me an almost identical canned response as from the article and I simply gave up and vowed to never buy another Blizzard game. About 6 months later on a whim I tried to play the game again and it worked, but the entire experience left such a bad taste in my mouth that I have no motivation to participate in this exercise in frustration.<p>The problem is that the mapping community had created some very inventive use of out-of-bounds memory access as a way to use the internal game APIs to accomplish things the game engine supports but isn't exposed to mappers. If you take a close look at almost every "big" map eventually you'll find some level of use of these techniques. The community created a "safe list" of known patterns of OOB memory access so that maps could be "verified" as not doing anything naughty while still also having access to these extra modding features.<p>The worst part? Blizzard was so aware of this situation that they actually re-implemented the OOB memory access in a safe way using known memory offsets. So, they fixed the actual OOB memory access so it shouldn't be possible to use an OOB memory access to crash your game or steal your "cdkey" or similar, but they have whitelisted many useful memory offsets so it's still possible to interact with the game engine in more complex ways.<p>That's the strangest part for me is that they put in a LOT of effort to remain that level of backwards compatibility and then banned players automatically when they tried to use it. Of course absolutely none of this was communicated to regular players in game and of course the forums are a complete shit show.<p>REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
SGX is probably not the right answer, but there have been suggestions to that effect,<p><a href="https://lifeasageek.github.io/papers/seonghyun-blackmirror.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://lifeasageek.github.io/papers/seonghyun-blackmirror.p...</a><p><a href="https://web.cse.ohio-state.edu/~lin.3021/file/SYSTEX16.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://web.cse.ohio-state.edu/~lin.3021/file/SYSTEX16.pdf</a>
It's worth keeping in mind that this is a company hit by government lawsuits alleging sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation, plus a staff walkout for similar reasons.<p>You should expect them to behave poorly, as they have a history of doing so. It's unfortunate, but you just have to give up on buying their games.
I wonder why they don't start to use secure enclaves to fix this cheating debacle? This might solve the problem for good. Between the cheaters and the companies trying to stem the tide, is destroying FPS online gaming.<p>I guess intel SGX chaos didn't help either.
Knock on wood my experience with Activision/MW/MW2 has been pretty flawless. The new game has some bugs, but in general it has been the best way for me and my buddies who live 3,000 miles away to remain in touch and hang out on the weekends.
One thing that I have been wondering about about anti cheat systems is that wouldn't people be able to do GDPR data request on their account? I would imagine that a lot the data they use for the ban decision would count as personal data and thus they would need to include it as part of the response. And if there are mistakes they would have option to rectify it.
Anti cheat is hard, very hard, and you will always those kind of false positive.<p>What I can say is that a lot of people say they don't cheat but they actually cheat.
>I don’t think they’re aware of the disservice they’re doing to their community by actively suppressing these reports (or conspiratorially, they’re influenced by Activision itself).<p>I think you underestimate the deluge of posts that are made by cheaters pleading their case in a public forum. It's so common that it's basically a meme. I don't blame the moderation policies that prohibit these posts. These posts are typically provocative and often try to riles users up against the developer. Nobody wants to read these posts, you can never be sure they're real and there's nothing a regular user can do except upvote it and subsequently ignore it. There's no good conversation or comments to be found, it's all bad stuff.<p>This is not to say the issue at hand isn't a very real problem. Anecdotally it feels like these kinds of situations are increasing with frequency as developers tire of the inevitable losing fight against cheating and are desperate to show their customers they're taking the problem seriously.